The Performa 6400/180 went on the market in the summer of
1996. Aimed at the consumer market, it was a departure from
recent past consumer offerings from
Apple. Past Performas had been fitted in a standard
desktop form factor. The 6400 sported a tower form with rounded
edges giving it something of an elegant look (though it was
dubbed a laundry hamper by MacWeek!). Inside the tower there
is a 603e processor (Apple's low end processor at the time)
and 16MB of RAM was standard (8MB soldered to the motherboard
and 8MB in one of the two available DIMM slots). RAM can be
expanded up to 136MB. The motherboard has two 7" PCI slots,
a Comm II slot (fitted with a 28.8 modem), a video slot (designed
specifically with Apple's Avid Video Card in mind - an-add
on option) and a TV/FM slot for Apple's TV/FM tuner card (also
an add-on option). There is a slot for adding a L2 cache -
the machine shipped without one. Adding a 512K L2 cache will
improve processor performance between 40-50%.

The hard drive on the 6400/180 is a 1.6GB IDE and the CD
ROM drive is 8x. One of the unique features of the 6400 was
the addition of a dual purpose speaker located on the bottom
of the machine's case. On it's own the speaker richly
reproduces all sounds. However if you plug-in external speakers,
the built-in speaker acts as a subwoofer, and higher register
tones are sent to the external speakers - pretty clever. Though
considered a machine with a great deal of multimedia potential
the 6400 was hobbled by relative limited on-board graphics.
Video memory is limited to 1MB and is not upgradable, limiting
you to 8-bit color at resolutions higher than 800 x 600 pixels
on a 17" monitor - unless you install a higher performance
video card in one of the PCI slots. Video performance itself
was considered sluggish.

At the time of the 6400's release there was stiff competition
from the PowerBase computers from Power Computing, which in
general received positive reviews and were substantially cheaper
than the 6400.

The 6400's processor was considered to be non-upgradable.
However several clever companies have figured out how to use
the L2 cache slot for processor upgrades. However Sonnet is
currently the only company that has such L2 cache slot upgrades
available.

Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results
for all of the current processor upgrades available for this
machine. Results marked in blue indicate that benchmark results
were done by us. All other results were provided by the upgrade
manufacturer. The bar graphs below express results as a percentage
of improvement over the base machine, which receives a score
of 100%. Further down the page you will find a table with
the actual MacBench score.